Reporting on key Nebraska K-12 education issues on a daily basis from Susan Darst Williams, a writer who lives at the base of Mount Laundry, Nebraska. To subscribe to this blog's mailing list, and see a variety of other education features and information, visit the main education website, www.GoBigEd.com

Isn’t it nice to know that today’s students are still smart and witty? Go Big Ed has reported on some pretty negative topics lately, so I thought I’d send a TGIF anecdote about parental involvement, school spirit and a cute student wisecrack from the local high school.

For our daughter’s softball district tournament, to go with the many signs we parents made to spur on the team, I made a 15-foot tall bat out of some PVP pipe, poster board and landscaping plastic. It looked awesome. The significance was that they needed BIG STICKS to do well. Nyuck nyuck.

I wanted a big softball to go with it, of course. A friend suggested one of those rubber bouncy balls people use for exercise. Perfect! I got a four-foot one, and spray-painted it fluorescent yellow-green, just like a softball.

I spray-painted the ball on Tuesday. On Wednesday, it still wasn’t dry. I figured it was because it was rainy and pretty humid out in the garage. The ball’s surface was sticky, but my husband was still able to draw lacing on it with red magic marker.

At 6:30 a.m. Thursday, when I loaded the bat and ball into the back of our pickup to put them up outside school, the paint was still pretty sticky. Oh, well. It still looked great.

Well, after school, I guess some boys had gotten the ball out of its moorings and were playing with it. The principal had to come over and get them to stop. Yep, the paint was STILL wet.

One of Eden’s friends cracked me up when he said:

‘’Since it was still so sticky, we can tell exactly who moved it. They were caught . . . GREEN-HANDED.’’